


A Tale of Beautiful Madness

by apfelhalm



Category: Changeling: The Lost, Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-01
Updated: 2013-05-01
Packaged: 2017-12-10 03:24:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/781221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apfelhalm/pseuds/apfelhalm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is a strange world that reminds him of the fairy-tales Jehan loved to talk about: myths and stories for the superstitious, poems about goblins and elves stealing away children. He never had time for them, never believed in them, and yet here they are, come alive in front of him. [Changeling: The Lost/Les Mis crossover]</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Tale of Beautiful Madness

**Author's Note:**

> A Changeling/Les Mis crossover written for [this prompt at the Kink Meme](http://makinghugospin.livejournal.com/9761.html?thread=240417#t240417). I wasn't going to post it openly at first, but since the original prompt is over a year old I figured I might just as well put it out here. Not beta-ed.

_“...He danced with a young woman with no hair, but who wore a wig of shining beetles that swarmed and seethed on her head. His third partner complained bitterly whenever Stephen's hand happened to brush her gown; she said it put her gown of its singing; and, when Stephen looked down, he saw that her gown was indeed covered with tiny mouths which opened and sang a little tune in a series of high, errie notes.”_  
― Susanna Clarke

 

"Will you permit it?" Grantaire asks and Enjolras nods - because what is it to him, now that it is all over?

Grantaire's fingers hold onto his arm and Enjolras holds onto the red flag, raising it up high. His eyes close at the first gunshot (not because he wants to but out of pure instinct), but where there should be pain, there is only the brush of air and then he falls, falls, falls.

*

He awakes in a maze of rotting wood and moss, earth and leaves, of bizarre buildings that seem to have grown out of the ground but appear to be anything but natural. They are trees and they are not, they are houses and they are not. Thorns are forming archways and stone is forming underwood and everywhere inbetween, there are shadows moving around.

Is he dead? He doesn't know. Enjolras wanders around aimlessly, sometimes calling for one of the others in the faint hope one of them might have survived. No one answers, not even Grantaire.

"Well, what have we here?"

She appears out of nowhere: her hair and skin are so fair they look almost white and her gown looks like woven milk. There is something inherently cruel in her beauty, like a winter's day painting icy patterns onto the window and taking the lives of those who don't have the money for a warm fire. Her smile makes his heart ache.

„You are lost. Come with me, boy.“

Before Enjolras can think about it, he finds himself taking her hand.

*

She leads him through the maze at a fast pace. He has trouble keeping abreast, even though he never seems to become tired.

„Madame,“ he says as he stumbles over a root, „madame, this doesn't look like the right way.“

He thought she would take him back, show him a way out, but the longer they walk, the less likely it seems to him. It is cold. Very cold.

„ _Tell me, Madame!_ “ he shouts, at last, his voice harsh and angry, because he has had enough of this. He shouldn't be here. He shouldn't even be alive. „Show me the way back!“

She stops dead in her tracks, silent, keeping a firm grasp on his hand. He tries to get away from her but finds that he can't, that her strength exceeds his. When she finally turns around, her face is full of cuts that have not been there before. Enjolras does not scare easily, but the crooked smile she gives him then makes his blood run cold. It is ike an icy hand grasping his heart and not letting go. Not ever.

„Who said anything about going back, little boy?“

*

She lives in a rotting castle that is beautiful or ugly or both at the same time, depending on the time of day, your level of sanity and the amount of hope you still have left.

Enjolras is a prisoner now. He is given expensive clothing and when he refuses to wear it, he gets beaten bloody by the guards. (Of course, there are guards. And walls, and thorns that grow so thick and high that not even Enjolras considers them for an escape.) The more he struggles, the more she enjoys herself.

There are others in her collection, too: well-dressed ladies and handsome young men, all of them breathtakingly beautiful and with terror in their eyes. There are maybe ten of them, but Enjolras is the only one who has not given up yet.

He whispers into their ears, talks of flight and asks for loopholes but more than once just meets apathetic glances. When the words won't show any effect, he resolves to violence, openly fighting the guards, sneering at them when they carry him back to the others.

"Don't you want to fight? Don't you want to be _free_?" he screams at them, but all he earns is haunted laughter.

*

It is a strange world that reminds him of the fairy-tales Jehan loved to talk about: myths and stories for the superstitious, poems about goblins and elves stealing away children. He never had time for them, never believed in them, and yet here they are, come alive in front of him.

The longer he stays, the more he can feel himself change. Often he touches his face, trying to reassure himself that it still feels the same, that he hasn't transformed like the others. His skin feels like stone now, cold and smooth and lifeless. Sometimes he imagines he can feel fine cracks under the tips of his fingers.

He clings onto words, repeats them like a prayer, because he must never forget his purpose: change, revolution, France, freedom, _fight_. His friends may be dead, but this, this will be waiting for him, he is sure.

He only needs to find a way back.

*

Weeks pass. Maybe years. Maybe centuries.

From time to time, he watches the trees cry.

*

The moment arrives sudden and unexpected: the blink of an eye in which the guards don't pay enough attention, a gap in the Hedge, a tear in the fabric of reality. He runs, runs and never looks back until he is out of breath, until his lungs burn, until the cold doesn't cling to his heart anymore.

He stumbles - over his own feet or maybe a root - and when he falls, it's not soft ground and earth that catches him but the planks of a dry and hard floor.

For a moment, he believes it was all a dream. All this time of slavery and suffering: an illusion right before his final death. Then he looks around and realises there are no soldiers, no Grantaire, no barricade.

He is back.

At least he hopes so.

*

He staggers through the streets of Paris, only to find that over a decade has passed and almost nothing has changed. As if their lives, deaths and beliefs never even stirred the sea of history, as if their revolution did not mean a single thing. The dresses are more outrageous, the people are poorer and nothing at all has changed.

Except, _except_ sometimes there are people with strange faces, strange limbs, a glitter in the corner of his eye. Things that do not belong here, things he has never noticed before but now seem to be everywhere, if you just look closely enough. He tries his hardest not to, but finds that he doesn't always succeed. People look at him strangely when he cringes at invisible shadows, and slowly, he starts to wonder if he has just gone mad.

The first time he looks into a mirror again, he has to keep himself from breaking it. His skin is a crust of cracks and stone and though he can move every muscle like he could before, it all seems strangely hard and eerily cold.

He looks away, swallowing down a bitter laugh, because Grantaire would have loved this, wouldn't he: he has become that marble statue after all.

*

The Café Musain has been torn down, his friends are buried, the neighbours have moved away. No one knows him and he knows no one.

That is, no one but a gentleman that runs into him one day. The man looks vaguely familiar, older than he probably really is, wealthy and well-dressed. There is kindness in his features, but also a strain that comes from too much sadness in one life. It's the freckles, however, that give him away.

Marius blinks, staring long and hard as if he's trying to see through something and then he whispers, disbelieving: "Enjolras?"

It takes him a few minutes to realise that, yes, that was his name.

*

Marius has a son, a young boy of ten years who appears to be earnest but gentle, shy and curious at the same time. There is also a woman, one Enjolras can only assume to be that Cosette Marius kept talking about in those last days before - _before_.

"We thought you were dead.You seem ...," Marius says and doesn't seem to find the right words.

"Transformed," Enjolras supplies, because he _knows_ , even without seeing it, feels it in every fibre of his body.

"Colder," Marius says quietly, but there is also a small and sad smile at the corner of his lips. Enjolras huffs.

"And you seem", he says, and then, too, hesitates to speak further.

There is nothing left of that naive, stubborn boy who would talk about passion and desire. While Marius' wife throws Enjolras confused and sometimes suspicious glances, she doesn't seem to realize what is wrong with him. Doesn't see behind the mask, the Glamour. Marius does. This is a man who stood with one foot in the grave and never really left it, who sees and hears things that are not meant for the living. He has lost a part of himself in that night at the barricade and gained something else entirely.

Enjolras is surprised to find that the thought saddens him.

"Older," he says eventually, even though he was never one for gentle words. "You seem older."

*

They leave him one of the guestrooms and assure him that he can stay as long as he wants to.

Cosette is kind and the child does not flinch away from him, even tough Enjolras is sure that he, too, must be able to see through the Glamour. There is something curious, something understanding in his little eyes. Children have a certain talent for seeing the unseen.

Every so often, Marius tries to talk to him, take him out into the streets, bring him back into the world again. He never asks Enjolras about what has happened to him, while Enjolras never asks about what happened to him at the barricade, and in the end, they don't talk much at all to avoid conflict. It is amusing, in a way, how some things never change.

Most of the time, however, they leave him to himself. He is grateful for that, because he is not sure how he is supposed to handle them (people in general) or this (a life that is but a mere shadow now) or the fact that everything he ever believed in was a lie.

He keeps to wandering through the house, buries himself in books or dark thoughts and tries to avoid reflecting surfaces at every cost. His time in the other world almost feels like a dream to him, memories blurred and unclear, but it's a dream that clings to him nonetheless. It's like sweat and fear and he finds that he can never fully shake it off, even now that he has long woken up.

It's only after he finds himself laughing desperately at the dead remnants of tree stump - for ten full minutes - that he finally realises he doesn't belong here anymore.

*

"What are you doing?"

"I'm leaving."

"What about-", Marius stumbles over the last word, as if unsure what to put there - "the people", "larger goals", "the republic"? Enjolras doesn't care about either of those words nor their empty meanings. Not anymore.

The look in his eyes seems to tell Marius enough, because he resigns himself to another question: "Where will you go?"

"There are others. There are" - Enjolras restrains himself from saying _things_ \- "people out there, people like me. I shall find them. I will speak to them and convince them. And then we shall fight."

Marius' smile is sad and pitiful. "For freedom?"

_For revenge_ , Enjolras thinks, but he just turns away and repeats: "we shall fight."

It is the only thing he has ever been good at, after all.


End file.
